ext_90810 ([identity profile] lyneidas.livejournal.com) wrote in [personal profile] flewellyn 2007-12-14 01:50 pm (UTC)

Well, Pinker's work in books like "How the Mind Works" tells us that humans have a lot of built-in ways of interacting with the world, most of them so obvious that people don't even notice them. As an example, Pinker described a movie shown to a test group, where the people in the test group said the characters in the movie had motivations. The characters in the movie are dots. Once you think about it, isn't it astonishing that people attribute human goals and emotions to a group of moving dots, as long as they move in particular ways? And everyone does it. It's built in to attribute motives to certain patterns of actions.

On a more humble note, there are things like the color names that, if you think about them long enough, challenge the blank slate idea quite effectively. Berlin and Kay did a survey of color terms. They found that the minimum number of color terms are light, dark, and red. The color that shows up almost always when there are four is green. Then comes either yellow or blue. They did tests with people in the various color-name groups and these people were easily able to distinguish differences between color chips even if they called them by the same name, so it's not that they have trouble seeing and identifying colors because of the cultural grounding imposed by the language. Also, according to the folks studying distribution of trying to make construction workers and crossing guards less easily overlooked, we see yellow-green light best under normal conditions. Surely, if we weren't programmed to think red is important, we should have yellow as the first color name, rather than a 50-50 shot at being third?

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